Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  Jonathan scrolled in closer. “Yeah, but it’s not much of one. But you’re right. Look how many times he visited it. The time stamps are all over the place.”

  “And it’s four blocks from the coffee shop.”

  They locked eyes and said it together: “Dead drop.”

  * * *

  Spike Catron pulled his cherry 1974 Corvette into a slot in the rear of his headquarters building. The faded sign out front declared this to be a Moose Lodge, but there hadn’t been a moose sighting in many a year. Cosmetically, the place looked like it should have been torn down years ago. Weeds and vines had taken over the front lot, and now were threatening to tear apart the brick façade. Located along a once well-traveled road that had been rendered irrelevant by the construction of a cross-county parkway, the lodge was nearly invisible to passersby.

  It wasn’t until you got close that you’d notice the heavy-duty steel doors and the concrete-set steel bars in the windows. The property belonged to a company called Bright Skies Environmental, Inc., which was a third-level shell belonging to Spike’s masters in Yemen. Blue Skies likewise paid for the upgrades and the utilities. Soundproof and bug proof, the headquarters for al-Amin in America was as secure as any bank physically, and many times more secure electronically because electronics were not allowed. No cell phones, no computers, no data terminals.

  Spike was first introduced to al-Amin while working as a clandestine asset for the US State Department in Yemen. Like every other beating heart in the Middle East, the members of al-Amin were suspected of planning terrorist strikes in the United States and among our allies. Less affiliated with any religious cause than they were to cash, al-Amin specialized in extortion, with a special emphasis on ransom. They would accept payment from another radical group—hell, from anybody—and in return, they would snatch a target from the street or from their sleep and deliver it to whoever placed the order. They got paid only for live deliveries, though living and injury-free were entirely different things.

  At the time, he’d been impressed that a terror organization could operate under such a pure a business model as profit and loss. Operations were much simpler to plan when they were not driven by ideology.

  As Spike’s time in the Sandbox evolved, he became progressively more familiar with al-Amin’s client list, and he was surprised to discover just how much of their kidnapping schedule was driven by the interests of the US government and its allies. It turned out that in the eyes of the Alphabet Agencies, the drawdown of American assets did nothing to reduce the need for intelligence data obtained the hard way, occasionally one fingernail at a time. Anyone who received a paycheck from Uncle Sam would face prison time for doing such a thing, but with enough attention to detail, it wasn’t that difficult to sub the dirty work out to guys who had been in that business for the last two thousand years.

  About two years ago, a fact crystalized in Spike’s mind, and clarified his worldview. War was about money. It was about the cash paid to mullahs and warlords for their ever-negotiable loyalty. It was about the money paid to the Beltway contractors, and about the money in campaign war chests on both sides of the conflict. Al-Amin existed in large part because of secret money paid to them by Uncle Sam.

  Spike figured what was good for his Uncle was good for him as well, so why not follow the boss’s lead and offer to extend al-Amin’s reach to American soil for a fee? Those Arab assholes would sell their left nut to get their hands on Americans snatched from US soil and cut off their heads—or drown them, or burn them alive, or whatever sick method of killing they could think of. But it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to set up shop here.

  Guys like Spike—and Bill Jones and Phil Marks and Paul Maroni, and the rest of his oh, so red-blooded American team—had no trouble getting as close as they needed to pull off whatever needed to be done. Up until now, they’d focused mainly on abducting corporate bigwigs and sending them to Mexico, where al-Amin was tight with a couple of the cartels, but now the heat was ramping up, and with it, the audacity of what the unnamed Sandbox Sheik wanted from them.

  They wanted high-profile soft targets, the favorite among them being the children of elected officials, who wandered through their lives unprotected. The plan was pretty simple: snatch the kids, drug them, and hand them off to a designated foreign official who then shipped them home as diplomatic baggage. The diplomatic status was a particularly brilliant touch, Spike thought. And man, was the pay good!

  A few months ago, the plan took an odd turn when the sheik demanded that the US complement of al-Amin expand into a new line of business, one that Spike considered to be reckless, but that he was nonetheless honor-bound to execute for fear of being outed by his Middle Eastern masters. They wanted a real terror strike somewhere in the heartland of the United States, the kind that would shake the country to its knees.

  It was one thing to drop the Twin Towers and make a hole in the Pentagon, but those were symbolic strikes that Mr. and Mrs. Mid-America had difficulty bonding with. People who chose to live in big cities accepted the risks that came with it. In the Heartland, people felt comfortable that they lived their lives under the radar, perpetuating the illusion that the War on Terror churned in areas that didn’t concern them.

  But suppose a bomb detonated in the middle of a high school football game in Iowa? The panic—the terror—would be sublime. The stock markets—the symbol of American wealth that seemed to piss off the camel jockeys worse than any other—would plummet. The government would be overwhelmed with demands for action that they could not possibly respond to, and when the people lost faith in the political system, chaos would rule. And if there was one condition in which history had proven that zealots could thrive, it was in the midst of anarchy.

  Since the end of World War Two, it had been the illusion of American invincibility that had driven American power. Once the nation was shown to be as vulnerable as any other nation, then American leadership would dissolve. One cannot lead, after all, when no one is willing to follow.

  Spike had feared that his troops would consider such a high-profile operation to be distasteful, too reminiscent of a suicide mission, but much to his surprise, they had embraced it with verve. The challenge, they all agreed, was to inflict the greatest possible damage while at the same time provide the greatest opportunity for evasion and escape. If the scope were large enough, and they left a big enough hole in the fabric of the community they attacked, then this would by definition be their last mission in the United States. No one on Spike’s team carried the suicide gene of the average jihadi.

  As they reviewed their options, they determined that the Iowa model, as they called it, was unworkable. Being in the middle of the country made escape to the border far too difficult. That meant that it was important to stay near one coast or the other. Since their home base was located in Virginia, the East Coast was the most logical point of attack, and the Old Dominion the simplest location from which to launch it. As they reviewed their options, they concluded that Northern Virginia offered the best of all options. It was the part of the state where the police were most constipated by matters politically correct, and where the local law enforcement agencies were enjoined from performing the kinds of stop-and-question operations that the rest of the country found instinctively appropriate.

  That invited even more questions for consideration. Close-in jurisdictions like Fairfax or Arlington Counties teemed with federal law enforcement types and enjoyed a tax base that allowed them to deploy armored personnel carriers and massive firepower with only minutes’ notice.

  As they looked farther south and west, the population densities thinned to the point that even a massive strike could only do so much damage—until you got to the military-dense Tidewater areas, where the federal presence again became a problem.

  All things considered, they’d determined Braddock County to be the best compromise. Real estate agents liked to call it a Washington suburb, but that was a stretch. It had a police department, but it
was short on technology thanks to a tax base that could not afford to live closer in. The fire departments in the county were still volunteer, and the back-up long guns in most of the police vehicles were pump-action shotguns. Some of the units had AR-15 variants, but they were spread wide throughout the area. Superior firepower meant everything to Spike and his team.

  Until a couple of days ago, Spike believed that all systems were go, and that they were closing in on a D-day that was maybe three weeks out. Now, though, with one operator dead, and a Haji team encroaching on their turf, he had an uneasy feeling about things on a number of fronts.

  The parking lot in the back of the lodge looked fairly full as Spike nosed into a spot two spaces away from the nearest vehicle. There was a strong argument to be made that a man in his line of work should drive only the most inconspicuous vehicles, but as far as he was concerned, there was nothing quite as suspicious as a single man under forty who chose to drive an inconspicuous car. Besides, he was a car guy, and the seventy-four ’Vette was a slice of engineering beauty. He always figured that he would die young, and with that being the case, he was going to die happy.

  Entering the lodge building required entering a twelve-digit random cipher and turning an eight-inch dead bolt. No one was allowed to answer a knock at the door. You either remembered the cipher or you were done. Short of using explosives—and quite a lot of them at that—police or anyone else would have one hell of a time serving any warrants in this place. And as soon as they arrived to try, the occupants would disappear though a network of tunnels that led to various friendly basements throughout the area.

  The perfectly balanced door pulled easily considering its four hundred pounds, revealing an interior that looked pretty much as Spike imagined it did back when moose roamed free. It could have been a time capsule from 1985. Ceiling fans churned the air below suspended acoustic panels, and beige linoleum tiles covered the floor. A sagging Formica bar stood in the far right-hand corner, its face constructed of the same knotty pine paneling that covered the walls. The assembled members of al-Amin in America sat in random clusters, either at the bar or at the long folding tables that were lined up cafeteria-style, as if to play a rousing game of bingo. Everyone Spike saw at first glance was nursing some kind of beverage, mostly beer, but a few were enjoying hard liquor. On a day like this, Spike fantasized about beer. Herb Townsend even read his mind as Spike entered, and was already pulling a Blue Moon from the tap to hand to him.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Spike said after a generous tip of the plastic stadium cup. “Thanks for being timely.”

  “This is a bad idea, Spike,” said Ace Reinhold, a former wet-work contractor for the CIA. “All the feds have to do is follow one of us to get all of us.”

  “I understand that, Ace, and when we break this thing up, we’re going to have to watch our backs for the next couple of days. But this meet is necessary, trust me.”

  Spike pulled one of the wooden spindle-back bar stools into the center of the room and spun it so that he could see all the faces. They numbered twenty in total, and they ranged in appearance from stereotypical biker to Boy Scout. All of them were strong as oxen, but a few of them had been away from the gym for a few weeks too long. The lighter guys tended to fall back to skinny, and the bigger guys grew guts.

  “We have a problem,” Spike said. “And I need to know what the hell is happening.”

  “You talking about Bill Jones falling off the grid?” asked Vince Caplan, the smallest man on the team, a former boonie rat with the disposition of a cobra.

  “Not yet,” Spike replied, “but I’ll get to that in a minute. Right now, we’ve got some Hajis screwing up a snatch and grab that I didn’t even know about.” He explained about the foiled efforts to kidnap the Johnson kid. “I’d be interested in hearing any theory on just what the hell is going on in our backyard that we don’t know about.”

  Drew Jackson raised his hand. Mid-thirties and sharp as a needle, Drew was the unofficial head of intel for the group. “I think it’s a trust thing. Hajis prefer to work with their own, just like we do.”

  “Any idea who those guys were?”

  Drew made a face. “What difference does it make? They all fly under the same radar. My prediction is that they were loving children from fabulous homes whose families are shocked—shocked, I tell you—to find out that their little darlings had been radicalized by that nasty Internet.” His comment drew a laugh from the group.

  Spike clarified his question. “I guess what I really want to know is why did the sheik feel compelled to hand this off to a group of amateurs? Does it mean that He’s losing confidence in us?”

  “Who gives a shit?” Vince asked. “It’s not like we don’t have other ops to plan. Judging from the results, the sheik can’t be very happy with his selection. Those boneheads blew an easy op. How did the cops find them?”

  “They didn’t,” Drew said. “The rescue wasn’t done by the police. They’re treating the incident as a triple murder, though not very energetically. They kind of get the point that it was a rescue, but they have no clue about the details.”

  “You’re getting this from your BCPD sources?” Spike asked.

  “Yes, and they’re completely stymied over who the shooters were.”

  “Do we have any idea?”

  Drew shrugged. “I don’t.”

  Spike scanned the room and got unison blank expressions.

  “I’ve got more,” Drew said. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  “I hate preambles like that,” Spike said.

  “I think Bill Jones is dead,” Drew said. “He’s the contractor who—”

  “I know who he is,” Spike snapped. “Why do you think he’s dead?”

  “He never checked in after he picked up the drop. I figured he was taking his time, practicing tradecraft or some such, but my police contact asked me if we were missing anyone. I told him no, and asked why he wanted to know. Apparently, there’s a John Doe in the morgue, and the kid who killed him says he was a kidnapper.”

  Spike gaped. “Finish the story.”

  “Okay, we know that Bill Jones is dead,” Drew said. He seemed nervous. “I told the mole to send me a pic just for the hell of it. It’s him.”

  “Did you say that?”

  “Of course not. But a face is a face. It’s him.”

  Spike weighed the details. “And your source told you that a kid killed him?”

  “Well, not literally a little boy. Early twenties. Made coffee for a living. Says he recognized the guy from when he was kidnapped when he was a little boy. Only my mole says there’s no record of that ever happening. And you want to hear the rest?”

  “Don’t play the game this way,” Spike warned. “Say what you have to say.”

  “The kid—the guy who killed him—tells a story of being rescued by a team of two guys, but there’s no record of that, either. What they have found is an unsolved case from somewhere in Ohio in which a few people were killed in what looked like a hostage rescue.”

  “Like what happened with the Hajis,” Spike said. He wanted to make sure that he actually heard the story the way it was told.

  “Except in this case, the dead were all white guys.”

  “So, it’s possible that Bill Jones—the John Doe in the morgue—was involved in a kidnapping . . . How long ago did this happen?”

  “Eleven years.”

  “Are you suggesting that Bill Jones was involved in a kidnapping eleven freaking years ago that was foiled by the same guys who broke apart the deal down near Quantico?”

  Drew looked more nervous, and Spike appreciated it. A little bit of fear among killers never hurt. “The alternative would be one of the wildest coincidences in history.”

  “It’s already one of the wildest coincidences in history!” Spike said. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Around the room, the assembled team exchanged glances and mumbled unintelligible comments.

  Spike’s
mind raced. When two or more things went to hell at the same time, they were always connected. Always. And it was always for a reason that created the most danger.

  “The sheik must think we’re a bunch of bumbling assholes,” Vince said.

  Spike wanted to be pissed at the comment, but the truth was the truth. “Would you blame him? I know we’re not, but I still think we look like bumbling assholes.”

  He pressed at the air with both hands, a physical effort to calm himself down. He needed to find the logical string to pull that would set this all right again. He told himself that he needed to break events down to their component parts. With Bill Jones dead—and what a ridiculous pseudonym, barely better than his current one of John Doe—that meant there were loose ends that needed to be tied.

  “How does a kid who pours coffee for a living kill a trained killer?”

  “You tell me. The cops say he just jumped him in the parking lot and stabbed him.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Spike said. “Coincidence on top of coincidence always means bad things. The kid belongs to somebody. All these screwups are related somehow, and it’s time for us to start flexing. I want to find a way to take that kid out. There’s no way that some teenager could kill Bill Jones with his bare hands.”

  “He had a knife,” Drew reminded.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Spike said. “It’s just not possible. If he—” Spike paused in mid-sentence as a new nightmarish thought occurred to him. “Was Jones killed before or after he serviced the dead drop?” Spike asked Drew.

  Drew’s face showed instant distress. “I don’t know. We need to check.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Spike said. “Are there any other problems out there that I need to know about?”

  Drew prepared himself with a loud, noisy breath. “Actually, there is.”

  Spike felt his chest tighten.

  “Again, this comes from my guys at BCPD.”

  “Jesus, what’s going on over there?”

  “Well, wait,” Drew said. “It’s a good thing that they stepped forward with this one. It turns out that there’s a civilian employee there named Cletus Bangstrom, who’s—”